Actor/director John Turturro (R) and actor James Gandolfini attend the 'Romance & Cigarettes' screening after party at Agent Provocateur, Aug. 30, 2007 in New York City. / Evan Agostini/Getty Images

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Free Press Staff Writer

MONTPELIER — Film students from the Vermont College of Fine Arts were at the Savoy Theater to learn, and John Turturro was there to provide lessons. This one, for instance:

“Exercise balls,” Turturro said, “are good for sex scenes.”

Turturro revealed to the capacity crowd at the Savoy Theater that Kate Winslet was not sitting astride James Gandolfini in Turturro’s 2007 film “Romance & Cigarettes” but was instead performing her bedroom calisthenics on an exercise ball. For the scenes involving Gandolfini, Turturro put Winslet’s red wig on his own hand to fill in for Gandolfini’s partner.

By filming the scene separately, Turturro said, the actors could explore their characters’ behavior more freely. “I’m very proud of that scene,” Turturro said.

He screened “Romance & Cigarettes” Nov. 1 at the conclusion of the initial week-long residency for the new master’s of arts in film at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and stayed after for about a half-hour to talk about the film. Turturro is best known as an actor in films such as “Do the Right Thing” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” but has worked several times as a director. His 1999 film “Illuminata” was based on a play by Brandon Cole, a member of the college’s film faculty who arranged for Turturro’s appearance in Montpelier.

Turturro apologized to the crowd at the Savoy for the explicit nature of “Romance & Cigarettes” — “I didn’t prepare everyone for what a dirty movie it is,” he said — and elaborated on the difficulty of filming sex scenes such as the comic one between Winslet and Gandolfini.

“Every scene has to have an obstacle” to be effective, Turturro said. “You need a problem in a scene to have a scene. That’s why sex scenes usually don’t work.”

“Romance & Cigarettes” deals with a family led by Gandolfini and Susan Sarandon, who are torn apart by the philandering ways of Gandolfini’s character, Nick Murder. The film starts with broad, exaggerated humor, grows more serious toward the end and is punctuated by characters bursting into song karaoke-style over pop songs by the likes of Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. The music is more than just a fun gimmick; the lyrics help advance the story and give insight into the characters’ heads as they sing.

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Turturro said “Romance & Cigarettes” is as if Charles Bukowski wrote an episode of “The Honeymooners” with music from Bruce Springsteen and James Brown. “As crazy as it is, it’s a very personal film,” he said, as it reflects the music and community of his youth in Queens. “It’s a film about just people. I didn’t want to do it in a straightforward way because I think everybody has an imagination.”

He said he began writing the film during the scenes in the 1991 Coen Brothers film “Barton Fink” where his title character is working on a screenplay at a typewriter. “Romance & Cigarettes” takes place in blue-collar Queens in run-of-the-mill houses and run-down motels. “You try to find a sort of poetry in the mundane” for the characters to play off of, Turturro said. “They’re never going to read Dostoyevsky, but they’re going to live it.”

“Romance & Cigarettes” is filled with familiar faces. Along with Gandolfini, Sarandon and Winslet, Turturro cast Steve Buscemi, Mary-Louise Parker, Christopher Walken and Mandy Moore. Turturro spoke fondly of Gandolfini, who died in June. Gandolfini was such a good actor, according to Turturro, because he was generous with his attention to his fellow performers.

“I haven’t seen that in a long time,” Turturro said after screening the film. “It was actually great to see James again.”

The pain Turturro feels at the loss of Gandolfini — he had hoped to work with “The Sopranos” actor again — follows the pain he felt with the difficult release of “Romance & Cigarettes.” United Artists planned to issue the film to at least 600 theaters, he said, but as the release date approached UA was absorbed by MGM. Everyone Turturro had worked with at UA, he said, was fired within 10 days, and the film came out only in limited release.

“I got stuck with the film,” he said. “We had a nice little run but it wasn’t the run that it deserved. It was a real heartbreak to me.”

Turturro’s romance with “Romance & Cigarettes” has him taking the film to festivals and small screenings such as the one in Montpelier. Though the audience in the tiny Savoy Theater applauded heartily at the conclusion of his vibrant film, Turturro said the bigger the crowd, the better it plays.

“The audience has to complete the film,” the director said. “It’s made for 500,000 people.”